I Am A Rock
by JadziaKathryn
Summary: Janeway reflects on how she has changed. I don't cry anymore, but I don't laugh either.


Disclaimer and Author's Note: I'm just playing with Paramount's property, in a very angsty way. Though not a songfic, this was inspired by Simon and Garfunkel's "I Am A Rock," which I likewise do not own. 

**I Am A Rock**

Sometimes, I wonder if you would still recognize me. Would you look at the woman who cradles a steaming mug of tea wherever she goes and think to yourself _she looks a little bit like someone I used to know_? Would you see who I have become and turn from me, wondering what I did to deserve this fate? Would you still smile, the way you did before?

Are you even alive?

I imagine you are, if only because I haven't been told of your death. Harry still sends me letters monthly from his post on Deep Space Nine. There are days I wonder if he does it because he feels obligated to, or because he wants to. Either way, I am glad for the small measure of comfort they bring; the irony that Harry now commands the place from which we set out on our long journey has not escaped me. 

It has been so long since I've heard from you that I can no longer remember when I got your last letter. Still, I ask myself why you never wrote again. Dignity being one of the few things I have left, I have never allowed myself to write to you again. I wrote you two letters in a row, and the ball is in your court. I will not beg with you to communicate with me. Was it yesterday or a decade ago? Certainly it wasn't yesterday, because I have a few more pictures of Miral after your letters stopped. Yes, I still have them all filed in my computer. She looks about ten in the last picture I have. That means it has to have been at least fifteen years since your last letter. It may have been more; time doesn't matter much to an old woman who lives in a little old house in Indiana. I have little need for material things now, and I retired an admiral. I'll live out the rest of my years comfortably. 

When I feel especially optimistic, I like to think that you wonder about me on occasion. I wonder if you can picture me an old woman who now thinks of her never-quite-finished book as her life's work. I wonder if you would like the book. Perhaps you assume I'm still in the 'Fleet, because the person I used to be would still be there. 

Then again, the person I used to be would have done a lot of things differently. Sometimes I think about her, and wonder where she ended and I began. Now it hardly matters. I have been this strange variant of myself for too long to go back to being her. She may have even died on _Voyager_, but if so it was so gradual that I didn't notice until years had passed. No, I cried at Tuvok's funeral after the accident, so it was after we returned, though the process may well have already begun. At any rate, the person I used to be exists only in memories now, and those who hold memories of her are growing smaller in number. 

I hope that time has been kinder to you than it has me. No, that's not enough. I hope that you have been kinder to yourself than I have been to myself. It isn't easy to admit that, but I think of all the people I have ever known, I owe you that small concession of honesty. All that I am today, all that I revile in myself today, I have brought upon myself. They say that no man is an island, and this may be true, but a woman can cut herself off from emotional ties with the world and become an island. A heart that once laughed, lived, and loved, if exposed too many times to heartbreak and strain, can harden to a rock in order to protect itself. The pathetic irony in this is that the very act of protection is the death blow to the heart. A heart can recover from anything except what it inflicts upon itself. 

If you saw me, would you even want to admit that you knew me once? That somewhere deep inside you is a man who loved the woman I used to be? Because before she died, that version of myself, and took regret with her, I know she used to regret that she never acted on her own love for you. Regret is a concept that I am unfamiliar with, perhaps because if I let myself feel it I would be overwhelmed by it, perhaps because I no longer feel anything at all. It hardly matters. What I want to know is this: would you mourn the passing of that woman, when she was replaced by me? Or have you stopped feeling as well?

Please, Chakotay, let yourself feel. It is something that cannot be undone, once you let your heart turn to stone. A Vulcan has more emotions than I do, and it is a fate I would not wish on anyone. You were too good a man to become hardened.

Yet, I would be lying if I did not admit that I enjoy it. Phoebe, who I haven't seen in some two years, told me years ago that I'm taking the easy way out. This is the first time I have allowed myself to wish that things were different. I am content to be a rock, because the storms do not affect me. Writing this has opened the way to pain I haven't felt since Tuvok's funeral. There is too much in this world- too much pain, too much death, too much that I should have done differently. I retreat to my book and the hard island that is my heart, and there I shall remain until I die. It is the way of things. It is the only way I know how to live, now. 

Still, I hope that you have escaped this fate. I don't cry anymore, Chakotay, but I don't laugh either. 


End file.
